How to Make a Commercial in 5 Easy Steps

To recap:

1. Who are we talking to?

2. Who are you?

3. What is your Brand's personality? 

4. What is the Offer?

5. Time to make your commercial.

A casting director for commercials told me that he looks for only two things in actors for ads, namely: that the actor is to be either very pretty or very funny. ( I guess it doesn't hurt to be pretty AND funny too! ) This is because he has to catch the attention of the audience and sell something in (usually) fifteen seconds. And that, he adds, is the same everywhere all over the world.

But are there any other way for ads to sell? Other than 'sex', 'sex' and 'sex'??! 

That's an old adage - 'sex sells'. But what does sex sell? If the audience remember the 'sex' more than the product, then it wouldn't work too!

Check the following ads out to see if they are sold based on the above five points and if the actors are really 'pretty' or 'funny'; or if 'sex sells'.

Now which product do you remember out of the ads?

Do the images fit their brand?

Are there 'call for action' at the end of the ads?

There are some who say that some ads plant subliminal messages in the videos to make their products more appealing. Subliminal messages are any sensory stimuli below an individual's threshold for conscious perception. What does that mean? Check the following video...

This is a photo I captured candidly by the shore in Singapore. Do you think it has any subliminal messages, even if it is an inadvertent result? Did you see anything 'evil'?

So watch out with what you put out next time, for you may be perceived to be manipulative! :)

If you haven't already done so, do take 10 seconds to fill out the survey on the top right of this page. It helps for me to know who is the audience. Thanks.

Other posts which you may find interesting are:
"Robert Redford Interviews", click here 
"Who Am I?", click here.


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Moonwalk

. . .

This is part of the commercial for Geodis Wilsons Industrial Projects Logistics Solutions. For the full clip, click here.

I did this act mostly for the fun of getting into the astronaut suit. It was hot inside, under the tropical sun, but after seeing the finished product, I felt it was all worth it.

This was how it actually looked like on set.

And this is what kids think I am. Who am I? Click here.

It was hot inside...

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A Hokkien Spewing Loan Shark

An extract from "A Price For Everything", a 10-minute film by RetroArts, directed by Yanni Ang.

In an ideal world, there would only be happy stories and scripts, not stories of gambling addictions, loan sharks, gangsters, foul language, kidnap and murder. And with that, I have just summarized the story of this film. 

I must confess that I had once upon a time fantasized of playing the role of a Hokkien (a Southern Chinese dialect) spewing gangster, and viola, here I am. So I would watch my thoughts here on, for they will come true!

The director wanted the dialogue to be colloquial and natural, deliberately careless with formal constructs and grammar - the street lingo of gangsters in Singapore, that is, the older gangsters, as the younger ones now speak Mandarin and Singlish.

I have butchered this clip out from the film proper myself. A very rough cut, since I had to hurry this through in between shoots and was working with very limited free software. The original film editing is way better.

Gangster roles are loud. There is a lot of shouting, intimidation, struggles and action. It is aggravating just living such a life just for the shoot, let alone being stuck with it for life! Thank God, this is only a fantasy - a film!

I prefer blissful scripts. One that makes me feel more relaxed after the shoot, than before. It happened before! Check it out, click here.

For my other infamous gangster act - click here.

Accents

This is a clip off the Singapore Airlines Awards Night corporate video.

Those Japanese who speak flawless English would probably love to clobber me for stereotyping their accent, the same reason some Chinese would like to do the same to Fu Mun Chu in Hollywood.

In this production, I was given the script about an hour before to memorise and think of how I can speak in such a way as to re-enact the experience of Mr Ito, who is a very satisfied Japanese passenger. It was a lot of sweat!

I learned a few things from this experience:

- That there are recurring patterns that one can copy in an accent.

- That to sound natural, the voice should come from the diaphragm and not the throat.

- That if you imagine you are the person you are trying to mimic, it helps.

Incidentally, this is good practice for a coming short film in Japanese this month, where I will act as a Japanese with a very emotive story line of performing euthanesia on his ailing wife.

Teaching Drama

Children are lovely. Along with puppies, kittens and flowers, they are my window to the divine. 

That said, teaching 36 children speech and drama ain't heaven, especially if it was to jump start  them into acting, compiling their own script and performing within five hours. Coming back from a photography assignment in Malaysia in the wee hours of the same morning with the class starting at 8 am, didn't help either.

And of course these little tots were no angels. Much of the time, they were running around and chatting away incessantly. Kids will be kids. With their boundless energy expanding into their everlasting bliss, they love taunting their teacher to see how far they can get away with and push the limits - ironically, the kind of attitude we want our artists to be. So I guess they were off to a good start.

The training started with the usual (physical) warming up exercises, then acting exercises to get them to move, to focus on different parts of their body and to reflect on how they felt while doing so. This I feel is an important exercise, as students are rarely taught to interprete their feelings elsewhere in the mainstream curriculum, if at all. Next, I got each one of them to take turns to stand in front of the class to introduce themselves. That way, they were compelled to project their voices to the back of the class where I moved the rest of their classmates to.

After that they were to act according to how they were inspired from pictures randomly picked from a bag.

The highlight of the class was when they were split into six groups to write their own script, do their own rehearsals and then ultimately presenting their performance. Here, I was really impressed with their creativity, resourcefulness and enthusiasm. Surprising considering their initial boisterous reception to their teacher. :)

In the end, they all said that they love the experience and had learned a few things!!! Five hours weren't enough time to make anyone an expert drama artiste, but judging from their enthusiasm, I think they were inspired.

That done, I had to rushed for my train to go to my next assignment, which was a union corporate training video complete  with long collective bargaining dialogues and union jargon. That was another grueling three-day shoot, and another story for another post.

Amid laid-back kampong (village) charm before landing in Singapore for the drama class with 36 boisterous kids!